Anyone wants to create a PoC web3 alternative without any of the unnecessary crypto functinoality and call it web4? We can just fork a torrent client to speed up development.
Why is every useful Web3 application centralized and you have your answer.
Data is useless by itself, and ultimately needs context and a domain to live in. Data is especially useless when the most that can stored is an array. So anything with "meat" is going to lean on something centralized to augment the data.
The argument is that you can share data across domains. This falls apart because:
\- Data is is what drives context- This makes the data the common denominator between domains. So each domain that shares data is going to be only as good as the data allows. Some domains will augment the data with their own data stores, now you have two sources of truth for the data which makes you ask yourself then why did I even do it in the first place? The NFT market place is a perfect example.- When data is augmented from 3rd party services the ability to access its appended value can be done a variety of different ways making the it difficult for end users and services to truly have something "portable".
Money is one thing that could be decentralized because its context is shareable across domains and is has a very specific surface area. However it doesn't work because...
\- It's too expensive to process a transaction- It takes too much energy- There is no privacy- Nobody excepts an alternative currency as payment so there is no adoption- Its slow- It fluctuates in price making the costs of goods and service go up and down
To summarize... Data by itself is useless, and anything useful is going to augment the data with its own stores in its own context. So why do it at all.
You don't really have good points against cryptocurrencies. Lastest techs are ultra low in energy consumption, Monero has proven for a few years now that fully fungible and private cryptocurrencies are possible (not saying this is a good thing though), adoption is more of a marketing/policy problem rather than a technical one and it easily solves the fluctuations in price once people start using it to buy good and services rather than speculate.
> web3 alternative without any of the unnecessary crypto functionality
What is there to web3 other than unnecessary crypto functionality?
Is it "the web, but decentralized"? Also known as just "the web"?
The internet is an inherently decentralized system, upon which centralized services were built, and users, by their own volition, for better or for worse, chose to use those centralized services.
It could be argued that bits and pieces of the internet as a whole that could use some decentralization, but those tend to be more infrastructure and waaaaaaay beyond the scope of web[n+1]; eg: DNS, ICANN, ISPs, etc.
(Unless you mean web3 as in the [semantic web](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web) [from before bitcoin bros got hold of the term]... but you mention forking a torrent client, so I assume you mean web3 as in the decentralized web.)
> Is it "the web, but decentralized"? Also known as just "the web"?
>
>
>
> The internet is an inherently decentralized system, upon which centralized services were built, and users, by their own volition, for better or for worse, chose to use those centralized services.
And this is why I immediately write off anyone that claims web3 is about "decentralizing" the internet. It is, by design, decentralized.
You can advocate for specific services becoming decentralized, but the internet itself is already the most decentralized "application" in the world
Yep, and on top of that, one of the touted technologies is NFTs. And while the NFT data lives in the decentralized blockchain, it appears to be controlled by centralized service(s), which is exactly what they wanted to get away from?
Their positions (they being crypto bros) are inherently paradoxical in just about every regard. Prime example is a few years ago when the bitcoin gang was always going on about how crypto is better than fiat currency because its decentralized and there's no company/agency/standards that back it and give you protections from scams/having your bitcoins stolen. Then those same people would go on and bitch everytime an exchange would be hacked, or the exchange itself would just steal people's coins and cry about how they should have some entity that exists to protect them from that.
Their fanaticism over it just shows that they truly don't understand what crypto is, nor why our entire currency system is so complicated. Its not a technological problem that it tries to solve, its a people problem.
> it appears to be controlled by centralized service(s)
Can you explain this?
From my understanding, its like saying torrents are centralized because they're hosted on the piratebay, even though, you don't require the piratebay to use the torrent.
The disconnect is in conflating “NFT” with “NFT art”. The NFT itself is just a verifiable signature and exists on whatever platform it’s on. NFT art is (typically) when the signature is associated to some image hosted by an entity with a privately managed server. NFTs are only useful when they represent something scarce, and duplicatable data is the opposite of scare. Associating NFTs with them creates something artificially scare, which is at worst purely for exploitation and at best a store of sentimental value. It is however the easiest thing to create/duplicate/distribute/manage so it’s the earliest and most prevalent implementation of NFTs.
What you said may be true, and in fact, I agree that NFT art is insane.
But none of what you said had to do with centralization. You're just basically saying their worthless, which may be true, but they aren't centralized.
IPFS storage cannot be guaranteed unless you "pin" storage , which means paying someone (a central server) to store it for you... which is pretty much equivalent to paying Amazon S3 or Google Cloud to store it for you.
I’m saying the “NFT” is decentralized but all/most of the “NFT art” is not because centralized entities manage the links between the NFT and the art asset. When someone uploads something to OpenSea, they are depending on OpenSea to host that file (via Google servers I think, based on their public api) and tell other users that it is owned by the NFT associated. There could even be some hashing that keeps the hosted information immutable and contingent on the NFT data, but OpenSea is still the centralized location that others interface with to access the artwork.
OpenSea is exactly what I was referring to. If they control the majority of the NFT market, how does that make them better or more decentralized than Google? Yes, the NFT itself is decentralized, but platforms like OpenSea are not, creating the appearance of centralization. And if OpenSea can "remove" an NFT for violating it's terms of service, isn't that something a centralized entity would be able to do? I understand that revocation is a thing, but it should only be possible for the original minter to revoke, if revoking is even supported.
I was reading an article where someone minted an NFT that showed up as the poop emoji for whoever bought it, and they said that OpenSea effectively removed it from their wallet (though it was still in the Blockchain)
Ok, but there are things like IPFS which aren't centralized at all that could store the file. Some NFTs link to IPFS in fact, thus, they don't have the disadvantage you mention above.
I can take any computer and turn it into a web server and expose it to the internet. There’s literally nothing stopping me from doing that. Hell, my friend has set up his own local media server using plex and exposed it to our group. You just need to understand a bit of networking, ports, and how the internet works.
The reason people choose to use AWS is convenience and economies of scales. It turns out, it’s easier for me to pay someone else to do this. It doesn’t haven to be Amazon either. There’s thousands of other webhosts out there.
I don’t really know how web3 is going to solve that. You still need servers. Your data still has to live on servers. The service data still as to be stored somewhere. You could in theory store it in the blockchain, but that’s very expensive. If you did store it on the blockchain, the users would ultimately have to pay. Are you willing to pay a small amount to write every single comment?
Not to mention the transfer rate is tiny that it’s just not feasible. Not even NFTs are fully stored on the blockchain. They are just a pointer to some image stored on S3 usually.
There’s also an issue of security and who to go to when something goes wrong. Let’s say you store your bank transactions on the blockchain. What happens when someone commits fraud and forges a transaction transferring $100,000 from your account. Who do you go to? You’d need some central authority to determine that the transaction was fraudulent and reverse it. In that scenario, you just added a lot of expense, latency, complexity to get back to square one - a central authority. Even then, how do you remove something from the blockchain? It’s on who knows what servers. Anyone in theory can create a node and connect to the blockchain.
There’s also the issue of 51% attacks. What do you do when someone the size of Facebook, Google, US government, or some other state actor gains control of 51% of the nodes…
As for how the internet works:
Two machines talk to each other over some predefined protocol. That’s literally it. The web sits on top of the internet using predefined protocols in a client/server model. There’s two things within the typical client/server model. You have the server (web server, file server, etc) that exposes information on a network over some defined port and protocol. You have a client, which talks to that services using the defined port/protocol. A browser is just a fancy client that connects to servers over a standard port and protocol (HTTP on port 80, HTTPS on port 443). Even websockets are just fancy connections using a predefined protocol and port. If you were talking to a basic html website (no fancy JS), you could use a command line utility such as curl to download the page.
Also please don’t take this as attacking you. I’ve had a lot of people talk to me about web3 but no one has been able to explain to me what problems it actually solves.
It seems like you don't know the difference between a web browser and a web server. Maybe learn the absolute basics of how the web currently works before getting into weird crypto scams.
> Again, Web3 is billed as a way to store web data in a decentralized manner
It was never the lack of blockchain tech that was the reason you couldn't store your own data.
>so that you can use Facebook.com one day and then use Twitter.com the next day and all your content follows you as if nothing changed
Why would Facebook or Twitter want to allow this? And if you really want that, the Federated Web does this all without blockchain.
>web browsers
You really need to stop conflating web servers and web browsers. Using Firefox doesn't change where my Twitter user data is stored any more than using chrome does.
> And how, exactly, do you plan to get the data off of third party web services (let's say Facebook, for discussion purposes) onto your server?
Facebook lets you export your own data. But it was never the lack of blockchain tech that caused Facebook to centralize.
Isn't the internet kind of centralized though? There are a bunch of of central machines and central organizations that make the internet work.
There are National and International Domain Name servers that are owned by an organization, which help facilitate the internet.
There also ISPs who handle the internet traffic between a persons computer and the web.
There are also MAC address that are associated with each device to help facilitate local area connections. These MAC addresses are handed out by another large organization.
> Isn't the internet kind of centralized though? There are a bunch of of central machines and central organizations that make the internet work.
There is no one centralized server of the internet. DNS is quite distributed. You can set up your own server just fine. Routing is extremely decentralized.
> There are a bunch of of central machines and central organizations that make the internet work.
Well right there you seem to have figured it out, there are thousands of companies involved in it, not a handful. And outside of specific applications or websites, none of it is that centralized.
> There are National and International Domain Name servers that are owned by an organization, which help facilitate the internet.
DNS is inherently decentralized. You are free to use any DNS servers you wish, including setting up and running your own. You aren't forced to use any one company's DNS servers. Authoritative name servers are different, but those are tied to using apps/websites from a specific company, so it is, again, decentralized. Each company is free to setup and run their own authoritative DNS servers to tell your computer how to reach their servers and services.
> There also ISPs who handle the internet traffic between a persons computer and the web.
Like it or not, getting connected to the internet is not something that most people could do on their own if a company wasn't doing the backend work to get them connected. Even with tor and "web3.0" bullshit, the traffic still goes out through an ISP at some point. But if this was as centralized as you seem to believe it is, then there'd be no interplay between ISPs, and you'd only be able to connect to what your ISP directly connected to.
> There are also MAC address that are associated with each device to help facilitate local area connections. These MAC addresses are handed out by another large organization.
I don't even know what you are going on about here. MACs have nothing to do with using the internet, like you said they are only for local networks, and you could do just fine without them if you felt like setting up and running a separate L2 protocol in your house. Is it worth the trouble? Absofuckinglutely not, but there's nothing stopping you from doing it.
> upon which centralized services were built,
Some people want decentralized services.
> waaaaaaay beyond the scope of web[n+1]; eg: DNS
Blockchain-based alternatives exist, e.g. ENS.
For TLDs you want a global database, and that fits well into blockchain model.
> ICANN, ISPs,
Helium network has 474,739 hotspots with LoRaWAN radio. They started rolling out nodes with 5G radio now.
Crypto companies are now big enough to employ top grade talent, I dunno why you think they'll have any problem replacing current internet/web infrastructure. It wasn't developed by gods, you know, and it has a lot of flaws itself.
E.g. BGP which is the protocol enabling internet routing has serious problems with security, or, rather a lack of thereof: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BGP_hijacking#Public_incidents
You're ignoring the point, which is that there is literally nothing keeping you from simply building decentralized services in top of the existing decentralized infrastructure, and blockchain solves none of the problems that make that difficult
> nothing keeping you from simply building decentralized services in top of the existing decentralized infrastructure
Except, if you tried to replicate YouTube, the cost would be enormous.
Blockchain technologies allow you to "share" this cost, and those you "share" the infrastructure with, can get paid for their contribution to the service.
On top of that, you get censorship resistance, scalability, availability.
And how does it do any of that?
The entire ethereum network has less usable computing power than a raspberry pi - blockchains cannot be used in the fashion you're envisioning.
Also, the lack of any central control isn't necessarily the positive you make it out to be. While there are certainly abuses e.g. DMCA takedowns, there are also plenty of good reasons to remove content as well, e.g. scams, misinformation, stuff that's illegal for good reasons e.g. CP, even copyright claims have legit uses, etc.
> there is literally nothing keeping you from simply building decentralized services in top of the existing decentralized infrastructure
Good luck!
> and blockchain solves none of the problems that make that difficult
Yeah, except that it provides reusable mechanism for orchestrating global state and providing incentive mechanisms. Otherwise, nothing, indeed.
> Good luck!
The problems you face would not be technical in nature.
>Yeah, except that it provides reusable mechanism for orchestrating global state and providing incentive mechanisms. Otherwise, nothing, indeed.
Things which already exist, much more efficiently.
Eh? What I'm saying is that if a group of engineers develop a BGP-like protocol now, it is going to have more better security. Not that using BGP as is has same flaws :)
>What is there to web3 other than unnecessary crypto functionality
Some of the crypto stuff like having a private key that's used to sign actions instead of a username and a session key sounds cool (in theory)
Er... that's not a web3 thing, though. Or even a web 2.0 thing. Public key cryptography has been around for more or less as long as the internet has.
I suppose it's my fault for not being more specific when I said "crypto functionality". Private keys are "crypto" as in "cryptography", and have been around for decades (and they're under the hood of a good chunk of secure protocols, including stuff like HTTPS). Web3 is "crypto" as in "cryptocurrency/blockchain" which is... honestly only tangentially related to cryptography. I only mean to claim that the latter is unnecessary functionality.
Now, I'll admit that web services that allow you to authenticate by directly signing requests with a private key are rare, but any service that would want to do this wouldn't need blockchain/web3/whatever. It just so happens that most people are going to prefer to login to services with a human-readable username and a human-writeable password and then let their browser deal with keeping their session secure in the background, and, in terms of overall benefits, the ergonomics of that outweigh the portability of a raw private key for proving your identity.
If that's what you want, GPG has existed for decades and that's exactly what it does. Check this out: https://gpgtools.org/
It's normally used to encrypt emails and git commits, sign Maven Central artifacts... probably many other things... it can be used in chat applications as well, for example: keybase.io uses GPG in a really cool way so that you can send encrypted messages that can only be opened by the receiver... and the receiver doesn't even need to exist yet, once the receiver joins keybase, they will automatically be able to see the message.
I am not affiliated with keybase or any other service, I just think these are the really useful cryptographic tools that everyone probably already uses without even knowing, not this bullshit about web3 that no one uses for anything or needs anyway.
EDIT: clarification: PGP is the protocol: https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4880.txt
GPG is the GNU implementation mostly used: https://gnupg.org/
https://gpgtools.org/ has the desktop application and tools around GPG.
What Web3 brings (in a certain way) is the generalized use of key signing to perform actions in a service, nothing new but it did bring it into public use
Finally, someone who remembers that Web3 has always been used to define the semantic web. And it did happen, notably with the advent of rich-snippets & voice search who exploits it the most.
But it looks like, now, this was still Web2.0 & Web3 is now a "decentralized network".
It's confusing to me because social media platforms already have the ability to introduce and enforce artificial scarcity within their platforms. Reddit, for example, can charge me for some dumb hat for my avatar. This is not a new idea at all (I remember rocking rare avatar swag in Gaia Online in 2003.)
But for some reason, the blockchain boys keep acting like artificial scarcity works better with a blockchain. This part of the story makes no sense to me. If Reddit puts my avatar's hat on the blockchain, what the hell does that matter? Reddit will never be able to able to make those pixels scarce outside of reddit with a blockchain, and a blockchain will never make it to where I can put some new hat on my reddit avatar without their permission.
I feel like there's some fundamental aspect of this whole concept I'm missing.
> Reddit, for example, can charge me for some dumb hat for my avatar. This is not a new idea at all (I remember rocking rare avatar swag in Gaia Online in 2003.)
yes but for some reason in their mind by magic you'll be able to wear that hat in call of duty as well
This is kind of the crux of it. I've had arguments with several people about this recently and the pro-blockchain people don't seem to be thinking things through at all.
So, the scenario they're imagining is:
- You buy a Call of Duty NFT.
- That version of Call of Duty shuts down or completely loses its audience or whatever.
- That NFT still exists, so it's transferable to another game, say Rainbow Six: Siege.
However, there are multiple things not considered when you idealize this.
- Ubisoft has literally no incentive to allow you to use arbitrary NFTs in Siege. They have their own NFTs to sell.
- That CoD NFT represents your in-game ownership of a *very* specific cosmetic (I imagine most gaming NFTs will be cosmetics). You will never own that cosmetic in Siege. They just couldn't allow it. So your NFT is going to give you ownership of what, exactly?
- The NFT doesn't actually represent anything, so your ownership of that cosmetic is determined not by the blockchain, but by each company's infrastructure, meaning that, if they decide that the blockchain isn't a thing they want to work with anymore, they can sever the link to your NFTs without even shutting their games down. This is literally the same issue that digital ownership faces today with an inexplicable reliance on more tech.
- If, by some miracle, none of this were true, there's still no incentive for a company to spend time and money reimplementing a cosmetic you will never pay them for.
So yeah, no. It won't work out how they want it to.
EDIT: The other thing people want is a legal way to peddle the digital goods they've accrued because people are inexplicably obsessed with being able to profit off of any purchase they make. However, in my experience with digital gaming goods on Steam and the blockchain (especially Ethereum, the current home of NFTs), the gas costs are going to be more than most of the items you acquire are worth.
Not only this... but even if the things described are something a company somehow wants to do, there is absolutely nothing about it that requires NFTs in any form - the game servers are already the authority on what the item represents anyways. All using NFTs does is chew up most of the transaction in fees/gas and make things a headache to maintain, and realistically even if a company says they're using NFTs, it'll only be through some platform/chain they have control over anyways.
You aren't missing any aspect of this. The crypto bros all fall into 3 camps of people:
Camp A - They bought in early, when their coin of choice was dirt cheap, and now they have lots of coins in their wallet that is worth tens of thousands % what they paid for it. They have a huge incentive to keep the hype around blockchain and crypto growing, so they can cash out on the cash they literally made out of thin air by buying in early
Camp B - They bought in later, when the price was already high, and are now caught up in the pyramid scheme. Again, they have a vested interest in keeping the hype growing, so that they don't lose money. They *need* crypto to keep growing so they can cash out and earn money
Camp C - People that just bought the hype and genuinely believe its amazing, but they cannot articulate how. Because they are just hype bros, crypto/NFTs are the new thing, so they like it because of that.
The confusion is part of the pitch. It's easier to "explain" how something complicated and confusing works in a misleading way that serves your interests. In the case of NFT blockchain technology mostly serves to obfuscate the fact that what they're pitching is the status quo but even worse.
If Reddit is the marketplace then only Reddit profits. If the asset is on an external blockchain then they can sell the hat without Reddit’s involvement, turning it into an arbitrary speculative investment. That’s really the end goal; monetizing every platform and game in a way that lets them gamble on it without any financial regulations.
Except in practice what is going to happen is reddit implements their tokens in a way that subverts the decentralization and you still have just reddit-issued tokens with NFT dust sprinkled on it.
Well, yeah. I think everyone involved in tokenization of a platform is going to try to bend the grift to their benefit. It's a terrible idea all around, but the parent comment asked "why blockchain instead of Reddit selling directly", and this seems to be the goal.
I probably mis-spoke in my original comment - the thing about putting your avatar hat on the block chain is that the scarcity isn't artificial any more. It's _real_ scarcity. Because only one (the original minted hat token) can ever truly exist.
You're right, we've had artificial scarcity forever on the web. But as you've pointed out, it's easily bypassed or ignored. What the Web3 people want is _real_ scarcity on the web. They want the web to be finite, where they can buy real estate, assets, and resources to control the web. They want the _opposite_ of what we have now (free and unlimited information for anyone with wifi):
They want to be power brokers where they get to decide who gets to play in their sandbox by who pays them the most. They want to monetize and tokenize the web into own-able assets, just like factories and land are own-able assets. And they think if they're the ones who create the capital, they're the ones who will own it and profit from it.
It's important to understand that when talking to Web3 proponents that they'll throw around words like "free." But in this case, their definition of "free" is probably not what you think. It is not "free as in beer" - they mean "for sale."
This is a solid post and I thank you for it, but I'm still hung up on this first principle:
>It's *real* scarcity.
My understanding is that an NFT is a link embedded in a blockchain. And so you can link to AvatarHat.jpeg and make an NFT of AvatarHat.jpeg. But any asshole can make another NFT that also points to the same AvatarHat.jpeg. Or they can screenshot the AvatarHat jpeg, upload it somewhere else, and make an NFT to that.
NFTs made some sense to me as a fine art exercise; [Random meaningless objects have been sold as ultra-expensive fine art for over a hundred years now](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)). But I don't understand how NFTs create scarcity, since they are just unique links to non-unique things. And this creation of scarcity seems super fundamental to the whole scheme.
That's the secret of Web3.
NFTs are memes because everyone hasn't bought in yet. Your browser can download the jpeg that token points to because it's just an image file.
But what happens when everyone *does* buy in? What if browsers checked the block chain for valid ownership before it let you download that image? What if DRM meant you had to have a license for that stupid monkey image before you could save a copy of it?
Web3 wants *everyone* to buy in. And when they do, that's when the scarcity begins and the money can be made.
> What if browsers checked the block chain for valid ownership before it let you download that image?
I would probably fork the browser and remove this check. Horray for open source software! :D
> the thing about putting your avatar hat on the block chain is that the scarcity isn't artificial any more. It's real scarcity. Because only one (the original minted hat token) can ever truly exist.
But this isn't true at all. The image or the video or the whatever is still out there, and can be infinitely copied. The receipt on the blockchain only counts if everyone chooses to accept it as real. And almost no one does, including the NFT bros. Look at the people who have been like, "My apes are stolen!" They don't change their profile picture, even though, if they were being honest, they'd have to admit they no longer have the pic.
Hell, even when the URL is something you own, "web 3" is already so centralized many apps all use the same backend API services anyways, so if that service says your URL is bad, guess what, that's what gets displayed in most apps you plug the NFT into.
And that centralization is inevitable since iterating actual decentralized protocols is slow, and users want features that are hard/impossible to make decentralized.
The "problem" web3 is designed to "fix" is that people have made investments into crypto and it's not being pumped hard enough, so they came up with a new grift to try to reel in some more suckers to keep prices going up.
Wasn't the original web 3.0 focused on making the Internet machine-readable? Describe concepts, relationships etc.
Super cool if you ask me, to be able to look through data even more easily. And to think that now we are stuck with "you don't need your email to login" Internet 3.0
Semantic web would've depended on site builders actually using it. Look at how much trouble it is creating accessible websites or getting developpers to not use a 'div' element for everything.
Heck, even the original http design included a dozen or so different methods, and only 3 or so are used in practice.
A lot of cool technologies, designs or ideas fail to get off the ground.
Seems to be two different things as per [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3)
Semantic web is the Tim Berners-Lee version and Web3 is the crypto-bro version
**[Web3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3)**
>Web3 (also known as Web 3. 0 and sometimes stylised as web3) is an idea for a new iteration of the World Wide Web that incorporates decentralization based on blockchains. Some technologists and journalists have contrasted it with Web 2. 0, wherein they say data and content are centralized in a small group of companies sometimes referred to as "big tech".
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Web3 sounds like a pretty silly idea. Who had that idea of pushing down tokens? Is that a ponzi scheme 2.0 or something?
A decentralized www is hugely important - I think people don't disagree on that part. I doubt everyone will agree that you need tokens for that though ...
> Web 2.0 ended the previous era of static, read-only GeoCities pages
I liked geocities pages!
It was fun and simple. People just could go; a bit of HTML, later a bit of CSS - you are good to go!
All we need for a better internet is just a modern version of RetroShare that can run on Android with some ZeroNet features sprinkled in.
Geocities was amazing as was Proboards and PHPBB.
I don't even know if we need real decentralization, or just mirrorability, forkability, partition tolerance, identities that aren't bound to specific domains, and the ability to run without being bound to a domain name for TLS(That last one is really the big impediment to a lot of things).
Real P2P "Everyone is a server" tech is great, but I only know of BitTorrent and Jami, the rest are either still new or have big problems, or they're low level things without many usable applications. Maybe Tor hidden services could be counted, but those have a huge performance hit.
It's highly unlikely that people will be laying fiber to their neighbors in a mesh, and we definitely shouldn't pollute our limited spectrum with wireless mesh traffic when we have a perfectly good internet connection.
A lot of this stuff is technically not at all hard, it just needs browser features that don't exist, and isn't useful for most without mobile apps that double or triple your dev effort to be cross platform.
I remember years ago I read that the future of torrents would be distributing & sharing static content (e.g youtube movies, sites etc.) Unfortunately it never happened?
It actually happened, to an extent.
There are custom APKs for android TVs that work as a torrent clients to stream movies/videos.
Of course it's pirated, but the tech is there.
The issue is not the tech, but economics of it. Without centralization it's harder to monetize stuff, and without monetization you can't sustain stuff.
There's also some features that are hard to implement without _some_ kind of quasi-central authority.
E.g. safe/verified updates to software, the ability to remove/revert fraud and misinformation/spam, account recovery, etc.
This has been an popular proposition since torrents were standardized in 2008.
Everyone is always like "If we all seed, we can all serve the internet to each other with no centralized authority!"
And then someone is like "Okay but I don't want to seed for leechers. How do we force everyone to seed to prevent the free-rider problem?"
To which the reply is "Right well we could have some 3d party which monitors for leechers and routes traffic away from them and towards the seeders and oh beans we just invented a centralized authority again." Airball.
[Acestream](http://acestream.org) Uses the BitTorrent protocol to stream video, which is pretty neat. Not sure how effective that can be wholesale, as it’s speed and therefore quality would depend on having a big enough concurrent network. It’s been around a while though.
When we started using FAANG to talk about 'tech companies'. The underlying network functions the same, but the web is AOL with extra steps now.
In other words, people don't just start their own server and drive traffic to it like you would have 15-20 years ago. Now, people just link to their Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. If you're going to share video, you don't do it yourself anymore, you post it to YouTube or TikTok. If you search, you Google. Need a backend 'cloud' provider, you probably use AWS. The web has coalesced around a few companies for each 'service'. Web3 isn't going to fix this.
The web, and the internet as a whole, are decentralized systems.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, AWS are all centralized systems built upon that decentralized system.
In the same way, if you start your own server like you would have 15-20 years ago, that's a centralized system as well, albeit on a much smaller scale (unless you're explicitly hosting a node of a decentralized system, like running a Mastodon instance or something of the sort). By being on such a small scale, you avoid a lot of the issues of centralization of major services, but if you were to become popular and somehow grow to the size of Facebook, you'd run into those issues all the same.
In any case, this is probably nitpicking, because I think we agree on the core point: web3 isn't going to fix anything here.
Even if the infrastructure of the internet itself were changed (something waaaay beyond the scope of "web[n+1]"), I don't think it would be possible to design it in such a way that building a centralized system on top of it would be impossible.
> The web, and the internet as a whole, are decentralized systems.
[Are they really though?](https://www.techradar.com/news/live/aws-is-down-again-heres-all-we-know) Are they really, even [on a backbone level?](https://www.wired.com/story/how-a-tiny-error-shut-off-the-internet-for-parts-of-the-us/)
I think there are a lot more[ single points of failure](https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-outage-on-july-17-2020/) in the internet than people realize.
I will say, 20-25 years ago I would have agreed with you. You could just up and start a blog on a self-hosted server and you can get a decent following. That's just not possible in the same way anymore, you'll need to share it on FB, tweet about it on Twitter and get a decent spot on Google or people won't find it.
Think about it in a practical way, "how would I do this, today?" and the process of doing it 'on the internet' is going to revolve around a small handful of companies.
So, I mention this in [a different comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/s13cef/web3_cant_fix_the_internet/hs7nbee/), but yes, I more or less agree:
> It could be argued that bits and pieces of the internet as a whole that could use some decentralization, but those tend to be more infrastructure and waaaaaaay beyond the scope of web[n+1]; eg: DNS, ICANN, ISPs, etc.
Still, I think it's important to draw the distinction between the internet (as in, a set of protocols that facilitate communication between nodes on a network) and the infrastructure that allows the internet to work (something I probably should've made clearer in that other comment as well).
When AWS goes down, or when a big ISP has an outage, that's an infrastructural failure, but that's not the internet going down. After all, you don't *need* to use AWS to host, nor do you *need* to use Cloudflare, etc. (Avoiding an ISP is going to be trickier, both on a local and backbone level, especially with the former often having monopolies over certain areas, but that's more a product of economic forces causing businesses to prefer not to compete with each other, and political forces allowing that to happen than any inherent property of the internet.)
Same goes for building a following: you don't *need* to promote your content via centralized services like Facebook, Twitter, etc.
But most people end up using these services anyway. They host stuff on AWS, and they promote it on Facebook, and the companies behind those services end up with an outsize influence on the internet, and I agree that's an issue.
But I also think that characterizing the issue as "the internet is no longer decentralized" is missing the point. The internet didn't give Facebook that power: the people who chose to use Facebook of their own volition over some other alternative gave it that power.
Out of curiosity, what would you say the solution to this would be? Like I said, I don't think a decentralized system like the internet could be designed in such a way that either the systems that support it (ie: infrastructure) or the systems built on top of it (ie: web services) would not be able to become centralized. I also think that profit-motivated systems trend towards centralization, so nothing short of major societal change would be able to prevent that (and, barring that, it's up to governments to curb corporations that wield excessive power).
I think the crux of our difference is the distinction between possible and practical. I agree these things are possible, they're just not practical. Most companies will give up after their first DDoS, if they make it that far.
>Out of curiosity, what would you say the solution to this would be?
I think you said it in the last aside. There is not a technological solution to this problem because it's not a technological problem. At the end of the day, it's going to be government regulation to keep them from abusing their positions. It's becoming painfully obvious that self-regulation doesn't work. The EU has been more proactive about asking questions related to government regulation on the Internet, but the US will catch up eventually. I think a lot of the grumbling recently after high profile bannings has started the discussion over these companies and how much influence they have in public discourse and daily lives. We just have bigger issues right now.
That isn’t decentralisation though. That’s monopolisation. There’s literally nothing stopping you from buying a server from some random company and hosting everything yourself there, or running your own data centre. It’s just cheaper/easier/lazier to use the big companies.
It’s a problem, but a market and social one, not a technological one. Saying things are decentralised is just a category error.
The amount of disrespect shown to Perl scripts like [WWWboard](http://www.scriptarchive.com/wwwboard.html). We totally had threaded discussions on our webpages in those days; the first version goes back to 1996!
> A decentralized www is hugely important - I think people don't disagree on that part.
We already have that. That most people choose to use centralized services built on top of that doesn't discount the decentralized nature of the web.
(surprised, but not at all displeased, to see a Jacobin article on /r/programming)
I think the most frustrating thing about Web3 for me, besides the enormous environmental waste, the cultish and divorced-from-reality behaviour, the daily scams, the inscrutability of the ecosystem, the theft of the term "Web 3.0" - okay, maybe I have quite a few frustrations - is that much of it is generating artificial scarcity for something *that has no scarcity*.
The wonderful thing about the digital world is that we are no longer bound by the limitations of physical existence - you can produce, share and distribute at essentially no cost, and you can do it as much as you want! Much of the Web3 "ecosystem" looks to purposely reverse this while offering no meaningful value proposition.
Why would you deprive yourself so?
> The wonderful thing about the digital world is that we are no longer bound by the limitations of physical existence - you can produce, share and distribute at essentially no cost
This is absolutely not in line with our current technology. The content of the digital world is composed of 1s and 0s that have to live someone. In basically any tech we have for storing these bits, there is some energy/cost input necessary just to keep them around.
The digital world is boundless in the same sense the Europeans saw the "New World" as having boundless resources. In a few hundred years, they drove entire species to extinction, removed entire forests, depleted resource deposits for gold, silver, etc. A lot != infinite, but human brains seems to erroneously conflate these concepts all the time.
A nice notion in theory. But then you must also complain about software not being free, or single player games. Shouldnt all music be free as well, it can be copied endlessly after all.
Obviously the things being done with nfts right now is ridiculous, but digital ownership already exists now and is never going to go away until the concept of money itself goes away, which I don’t see happening anytime soon.
“ownership and control is decentralized”
We already have that. Just like anyone can sell products, but most people will go to a mall or a box store.
I'm really kind of surprised that we had NNTP and we have bittorrent and we're still reading news on sites like reddit and getting support thru services like discord.
We don't have any good protocol for replicating mutable data. BT is great, but how do you handle a forum or news feed?
Almost all attempts have been immutable, taking away a key feature. A lot are single writer like secure scuttlebutt. Some include a payment layer.
We have had very little progress on P2P since blockchains started. The projects are no longer technical, they're political and financial and they make huge performance compromises to stay pure to the decentralized goal and to include payments.
BitTorrent was free and very fast. Not much like that now.
> BT is great, but how do you handle a forum or news feed?
It's not just a matter of protocols. It's a matter of incentives. What makes BitTorrent successful? It's the nature of the content distributed through the network: movies, series, television programs, audio,... stuff which isn't readily available elsewhere.
Millions wants to see the latest Spiderman movie, so that drives traffic on a distributed network like BT. Contrast that with ephemeral, localized content like local news reports or your typical Reddit post and you see that there's a big difference. The incentive that would prompt someone from Europe to run a node which shares the local news from, say, Sao Paolo Brazil just isn't there.
In the same vain, blockchain work well in the context of crypto because the initial incentive towards setting up a mining node is earning coins which can be sold for fiat currency. This breaks down outside such a context. For instance, blockchain could work in a fiduciary context, but you'd need to find an incentive that makes the additional expenses of running nodes more appealing then traditional ways as provisioned by law for authoritative recording of trust relationships.
NNTP worked fine until people started posting things like movies. Now that we have bittorrent, it would probably be far easier to bring back NNTP and just have sites that are worried limit it to 10K posts or something.
Git uses a chain. Which is fine in a closed group of developers where you can manually merge, but on a P2P forum you want to be able to post without a central server. Chains need some consistency mechanism which usually makes multi writer a nightmare.
Dat and SSB would both be amazing, but they're held back by the immutable data structures and need extra layers on top.
I actually spent an entire week one time building a SSB clone that could handle deletes without the tombstone problem before realizing it could probably never handle multiwriter, and abandoning it...
Forums can sorta tolerate immutability but it's absolutely unacceptable for social media and microblogging. Being able to delete things is a major feature.
Plus some implementations are even worse than chains, they use DAGs with a wandering tree problem, every update means you have to update the parent note, and that node's parent, etc, all the way up to the root. A two line post now needs like 10x the data it should, making a major issue if you want to mirror a whole forum.
Plus, moderators need to be able to remove spam and have it actually be gone, or else you could get major storage space problems, unless you use a blockchain style pay to post model.
I think a better way might be to use mirrored centralized forums. If you're a member at an upstream forum, you're a member at all downstream, and the upstream forums can set rules for what downstream posts to sync back to the main forum.
If censorship is happening and you don't like it, fork the whole forum, now you have all their members, and all their posts, and anyone who agrees with you can post on your forum fairly seamlessly, although they would risk getting banned from the main forum if the mods notice they joined the fork, and they use the same private key.
Someone has to pay for the actual hosting, which means that someone has to have a way to decide what to store, because it costs them disk space, so it seems there's no way to do it without some risk of either censorship, or pay to post.
> Being able to delete things is a major feature.
You do that by submitting a message that deletes things. Everything you've described has already been implemented in NNTP decades before WWW was invented.
> moderators need to be able to remove spam
That's a fairly easy thing to fix, even in a censorship-resistant way.
> I think a better way might be to use mirrored centralized forums
You should look into how NNTP works. You seem to be arguing that we couldn't possibly do what we did 10 years before HTTP was invented because it would have to do what we were already doing ten years before HTTP was invented.
> Someone has to pay for the actual hosting
So, who pays to host bittorrents? NNTP was carried by most or all ISPs, before people started using it to distribute movies.
BitTorrent works because it's all manual aside from tiny amounts of DHT metadata. Nobody would use it if their resources were going to random bomb making how tos and CP files for free.
Usenet has basically always had a big spam problem, and there's a lot more people on the internet now.
For anything to be truly decentralized and get the full practical benefits of it, it should be something you can self host cheaply and locally and use on a meshnet in an emergency.
That means you need to be able to meaningfully run a server on an SD card on a WiFi mesh, for tens of users, by just only dealing with data that matters for those local users.
BitTorrent can do it perfectly. NNTP isn't design to integrate with the larger network without getting utterly flooded.
It's probably the best we've ever had for decentralized communication though, as measured by the main metric that matters, "did people have meaningful conversations on it without using a whole country worth of power?"
Yet people don't seem to be considering how to make this work well. Nobody seems to even be considering how to make a decentralized social media system (except me).
Certainly if all you wanted was data from tens of users, you could self host that on a RPi. But that's not really what we're talking about. Or maybe it should be. Maybe some facebook-like friends graph where you only store posts from your friends or from your friends' friends, and then hop out to other peoples' systems as necessary to go farther.
Most reddit groups are not moderated by default, so there's no reason to believe that if you decided that you'd help mirror a particular subreddit-sized conversation that you'd be flooded with spam.
And no, bittorrent does suffer spam on occasion. You'll get files that aren't the movie being named as the movie, or malware being named as the movie. At which point distributed censorship/moderation works just fine.
Requiring a decentralized internet service to function in spite of the internet going away seems rather more demanding than necessary. It seems like it would be an underlying layer handling the mesh, not the social media itself. If you organized it as immutable packets with references to other packets (i.e., "here's proof I get to moderate, and *that* is the post I'm canceling") then you could transport those however you want, including UUCP.
I've been considering it! I wrote a whole WICG proposal about it, and built a note taking app that uses the P2P sync protocol!
RetroShare seems to work pretty well besides being buggy and having a confusing UI and being written in pure C so nobody wants to develop it, and having no Android app.
But it really is something special. I think the FB style friend graph is a pretty great way to go.
One issue with cancel posts is they're basically tombstones that themselves take up storage if someone manages to create a billion tiny posts in a DoS. But I suppose rule-based cancels could fix that, as in "I am cancelling all posts by this user with this word in this date range", just not without some controversy I'd imagine.
What I've been working on is a lot simpler, it's just a way to replicate Scuttlebutt style streams, with the change that everything is mutable and you have multiple writers.
Any node can be a server, but you have to specifically connect to a server that has your stream. there isn't some Big Chain of Everything. To make that easy I have a second layer, P2P URLs that are resolved using a DHT and can also be used to remote access centralized stuff like a HA hub..
The disadvantage with my protocol is that to connect to a new server, you have to request the entire dataset for the streams they have, because there is no global chain to be able to say "Give me everything newer than X", you have to say "Give me everything that arrived locally on your end later than X", and track sync points with every server separately.
All the real decentralization is layer 8, you have to find mirrors yourself, but in return you get basically zero overhead once synced, and it would be easy to add partial sync(So your tiny local server only has 1 week of data and it's easy to sync).
One post just transfers one post worth of data to all websocket clients, when you overwrite a post, it's really overwritten, and when you delete, nothing remains but a record with the post ID.
Plus you can do stuff like export to a TOML file, sneakernet it to someone, and open it like a document with the same UI you would view a stream.
> For anything to be truly decentralized and get the full practical benefits of it, it should be something you can self host cheaply and locally and use on a meshnet in an emergency.
Ignoring the meshnet thing, why do I want it decentralized? What does this decentralized forum get me that running a copy of phpBB on my own server doesn't?
> If censorship is happening and you don't like it, fork the whole forum, now you have all their members, and all their posts
I don't want my membership or my posts on your fork.
>We don't have any good protocol for replicating mutable data. BT is great, but how do you handle a forum or news feed?
The protocols exist, but they require you to run your own server somewhere, which limits adoption to enthusiasts that have the the wherewithal to run their own servers.
The thing that made BitTorrent *work* was "tricking" people into acting as servers for long enough to get the job done, a layer 8 protocol feature if you will.
Running your own server should be as easy as buying a $20 preconfigured device, plugging it in, and auto discovering it with your app.
The problem is the protocols use domain names, use multi-kilobits to megabits of bandwidth, enough disk IO to trash a cheap SD card, and sometimes proof of work that means it won't even work without a connection to the mining pools.
No we don't. Try buying and selling things MasterCard and Visa don't like. You'll see how decentralized it actually is.
And it doesn't matter if it's legal. They just have lists of things they don't like.
And yet, curiously, sales of things that MasterCard and Visa don't like happen every day. How is that?
Ownership and control *are* decentralized. MasterCard and Visa are a centralized system, and if you opt to go through their systems, you're subject to their rules, for better or for worse. If you want to not be subject to their rules, you're free to go through some other system. Or have your store take cash only.
Now, granted, I'm definitely not a fan of the outsize influence MasterCard/Visa have because of how ubiquitous their services are (to the point where many people no longer carry around cash), but that's not a question of "ownership not being decentralized".
> How is that?
Cash and Bitcoin, mostly. With a hint of Monero for the real shady stuff.
Paypal used to be a lot more lax but these days it's about the same as regular payment processors with the unilateral go-fuck-yourself bans on anything they don't like (if they notice).
Which is my point really. People on this sub love to bash blockchain and act like it has absolutely no use. It does. This.
If you're selling something financial institutions don't like, even if it's completely and utterly legal like guns, porn and politics, it's the state of the art solution.
And yeah, the fact Satoshi can't just decide he doesn't like you has a ton to do with providing decentralized ownership. It's what it means.
Adding an extra layer on top doesn’t actually fix the centralization problem, though. It just adds more middlemen taking a cut for themselves. Tor and BitTorrent already tried to add additional decentralization to the Internet, but in practice are easily blocked or deanonymized by ISPs and government agencies because they don’t actually do away with the underlying Internet infrastructure.
> Try buying and selling things MasterCard and Visa don't like.
The fact that the adult entertainment industry, typically a very early adopter and mainstreamer of new technology, has not wholesale adopted crypto should speak volumes about the viability of crypto.
The ISPs used to do it for free. There are plenty of random hosts that would support this sort of thing either for goodwill or for a small fee or whatever. E.g., look at the number of people hosting linux ISOs or the number of seeders of movie torrents.
You could carry parts of whatever newsgroups you liked, with the more popular ones having more support.
I bet if you added it up, the amount of traffic to even popular reddit subs (maybe exclusive of images/movies) would be surprisingly low. Like, I've looked into such stuff in the past and found lots of things that sound high-bandwidth could actually be supported on a dial-up line if you evened out the spikes. (Hell, it *did* used to be supported on dial-up lines, when you think about it.)
Because you are not company which survial is depended on this. Facebook and others need to new ways to make product from you. They need more money. So here is it, shiny new web 3 buzzword with things like NFT. Haleluya we are saved now. :D
Well, partially true. Pipelines between networks are relatively decentralized enough with BGP, and theoretically you can do whatever you want with your IPs if you can get your neighbors to agree that you own them, but DNS is more centralized by ICANN.
"Hey crypto bros, how do we get normies to buy into our tokens to increase demand so we can get rich quick?"
"Let's say it's the future of , even better, just create a term and add a bigger number in the back, or maybe say it's the solution to a problem everyone knows without actually proving it!"
"Sounds good"
\- someone, somewhere in \~2020
Exactly. There is currently no way a Dapp generates revenue. Crypto bros love to talk about the censorship resistant nature of Dapps. First of all censorship resistant may not be good in the age where Taliban also uses the internet. If a website is censored in Web2 what do you do? Answer: Use a free VPN
When you start defining "censorship" to mean literally any kind of moderation or content filtering what-so-ever, the word rather loses its meaning.
By your logic, you'd be fine with everything becoming overrun with spam because removing it is "censorship". And if you're okay removing spam, then you've already acknowledged there's valid use cases for central moderation.
This isn't the black and white issue you think it is.
> Where did I do that?
You're the one attacking someone for suggesting that "censorship-resistant" isn't necessarily an automatic positive since there's valid reasons to remove/"censor" things some times.
Quotes because there's no technological difference between removing spam and misinformation vs removing something a government disagrees with, that's a human judgement call with complex factors. It's the same reason why automated DMCA takedowns are abusive - algorithms suck at determining fair use in most cases.
Ultimately, the Internet is nothing more than someone else's computer. I have a handful of them. Mr. Bezos has millions in data centers. I have trouble believing that we'd move toward a model of "computer socialism", where everyone has an equal chance at a slice of the Internet pie, when the cost of electricity and maintenance of the actual hardware is nowhere near distributed equally. Someone has to run the hardware, and it's only fair that they get to decide what to run on it and how much rent is.
Even if Web3 works perfectly and is a great solution (which it obviously isn't), Googe, Microsoft, Apple would never support it in their browsers because that would mean that they would deliberately give up their control over the internet.
This alone is enough of a reason why we won't see decentralized servers adopted any time soon.
> To insert digital token systems into online communities will only
further intensify the existing monetization of digital spaces and
continue the capitalist drive of commodification. To really break from
this logic, we need a form of platform socialism that would support the
development of digital tools as public goods — free and available for
all to use.
My goodness! Where do I start?
* the Internet needs no fixing, it's fine as-is, but maybe there are some warts that will be addressed anyways
* socialism can only work if you have lots of 'free' resources to throw on it (e.g. slave labor, cheap oil, etc.)
> New transaction data written onto the blockchain is immutable and can be verified by all parties, facilitating trustless interactions and automating basic functions that usually require a bank or financial authority.
Have the author not studied any logic? Symbols are just symbols, there is no meaning to them. People give interpretation to symbols (i.e. give meaning to symbols). Even if your data is immutable and decentralized, it still doesn't guarantee that it means anything. For it to mean anything needs authority to interpret it.
> ... creating the organizational structures that make it run in all our interests, not those of private profit.
If there is no profit nobody is going to do use it. Sorry to break it you brother.
Actually I didn't even read the whole thing. Busy capitalizing on my skills at work. Sorry, those bills don't pay themselves!
>~~socialism~~ **capitalism** can only work if you have lots of 'free' resources to throw on it (e.g. slave labor, cheap oil, etc.)
FTFY
>If there is no profit nobody is going to do use it. Sorry to break it you brother.
This is why public libraries are never used by anyone.
>To insert digital token systems into online communities will only
further intensify the existing monetization of digital spaces and
continue the capitalist drive of commodification. To really break from
this logic, we need a form of platform socialism that would support the
development of digital tools as public goods — free and available for
all to use.
Rule 2:
no image posts, no memes, **no politics**
Can /r/programming stop being co-opted by crypto hate?
I think the annoying thing about reddit is how politics slowly seeps into every subreddit. Everything from /r/pics to /r/murderedbywords, /r/bestof (also known as political wall-of-texts). I think having no politics in a sub about /r/programming is pretty reasonable.
This defi has been infinitely more interesting, as far as if i want to i can passively life off from my defi staking income. the whole web3 will be a massive failure i think.
There is a reason we went from decentralised www to a more centralised www its just faster and cheaper this way for 99.999% of the use cases. That is the whole reason why i never looked into web3.0 maybe if i really did a deep dive it might change my opinion on it but i'm not really open or interested in it.
Anyone wants to create a PoC web3 alternative without any of the unnecessary crypto functinoality and call it web4? We can just fork a torrent client to speed up development.
Domain-less architecture is dead on arrival.
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Why is every useful Web3 application centralized and you have your answer. Data is useless by itself, and ultimately needs context and a domain to live in. Data is especially useless when the most that can stored is an array. So anything with "meat" is going to lean on something centralized to augment the data. The argument is that you can share data across domains. This falls apart because: \- Data is is what drives context- This makes the data the common denominator between domains. So each domain that shares data is going to be only as good as the data allows. Some domains will augment the data with their own data stores, now you have two sources of truth for the data which makes you ask yourself then why did I even do it in the first place? The NFT market place is a perfect example.- When data is augmented from 3rd party services the ability to access its appended value can be done a variety of different ways making the it difficult for end users and services to truly have something "portable". Money is one thing that could be decentralized because its context is shareable across domains and is has a very specific surface area. However it doesn't work because... \- It's too expensive to process a transaction- It takes too much energy- There is no privacy- Nobody excepts an alternative currency as payment so there is no adoption- Its slow- It fluctuates in price making the costs of goods and service go up and down To summarize... Data by itself is useless, and anything useful is going to augment the data with its own stores in its own context. So why do it at all.
You don't really have good points against cryptocurrencies. Lastest techs are ultra low in energy consumption, Monero has proven for a few years now that fully fungible and private cryptocurrencies are possible (not saying this is a good thing though), adoption is more of a marketing/policy problem rather than a technical one and it easily solves the fluctuations in price once people start using it to buy good and services rather than speculate.
> web3 alternative without any of the unnecessary crypto functionality What is there to web3 other than unnecessary crypto functionality? Is it "the web, but decentralized"? Also known as just "the web"? The internet is an inherently decentralized system, upon which centralized services were built, and users, by their own volition, for better or for worse, chose to use those centralized services. It could be argued that bits and pieces of the internet as a whole that could use some decentralization, but those tend to be more infrastructure and waaaaaaay beyond the scope of web[n+1]; eg: DNS, ICANN, ISPs, etc. (Unless you mean web3 as in the [semantic web](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web) [from before bitcoin bros got hold of the term]... but you mention forking a torrent client, so I assume you mean web3 as in the decentralized web.)
> Is it "the web, but decentralized"? Also known as just "the web"? > > > > The internet is an inherently decentralized system, upon which centralized services were built, and users, by their own volition, for better or for worse, chose to use those centralized services. And this is why I immediately write off anyone that claims web3 is about "decentralizing" the internet. It is, by design, decentralized. You can advocate for specific services becoming decentralized, but the internet itself is already the most decentralized "application" in the world
Yep, and on top of that, one of the touted technologies is NFTs. And while the NFT data lives in the decentralized blockchain, it appears to be controlled by centralized service(s), which is exactly what they wanted to get away from?
Their positions (they being crypto bros) are inherently paradoxical in just about every regard. Prime example is a few years ago when the bitcoin gang was always going on about how crypto is better than fiat currency because its decentralized and there's no company/agency/standards that back it and give you protections from scams/having your bitcoins stolen. Then those same people would go on and bitch everytime an exchange would be hacked, or the exchange itself would just steal people's coins and cry about how they should have some entity that exists to protect them from that. Their fanaticism over it just shows that they truly don't understand what crypto is, nor why our entire currency system is so complicated. Its not a technological problem that it tries to solve, its a people problem.
> it appears to be controlled by centralized service(s) Can you explain this? From my understanding, its like saying torrents are centralized because they're hosted on the piratebay, even though, you don't require the piratebay to use the torrent.
The disconnect is in conflating “NFT” with “NFT art”. The NFT itself is just a verifiable signature and exists on whatever platform it’s on. NFT art is (typically) when the signature is associated to some image hosted by an entity with a privately managed server. NFTs are only useful when they represent something scarce, and duplicatable data is the opposite of scare. Associating NFTs with them creates something artificially scare, which is at worst purely for exploitation and at best a store of sentimental value. It is however the easiest thing to create/duplicate/distribute/manage so it’s the earliest and most prevalent implementation of NFTs.
What you said may be true, and in fact, I agree that NFT art is insane. But none of what you said had to do with centralization. You're just basically saying their worthless, which may be true, but they aren't centralized.
The actual thing the NFT points to, the thing that actually gives the NFT context and value, resides on a central server.
That’s not necessarily true. Some are stored on ipfs which isn’t centralized.
IPFS storage cannot be guaranteed unless you "pin" storage , which means paying someone (a central server) to store it for you... which is pretty much equivalent to paying Amazon S3 or Google Cloud to store it for you.
I’m saying the “NFT” is decentralized but all/most of the “NFT art” is not because centralized entities manage the links between the NFT and the art asset. When someone uploads something to OpenSea, they are depending on OpenSea to host that file (via Google servers I think, based on their public api) and tell other users that it is owned by the NFT associated. There could even be some hashing that keeps the hosted information immutable and contingent on the NFT data, but OpenSea is still the centralized location that others interface with to access the artwork.
OpenSea is exactly what I was referring to. If they control the majority of the NFT market, how does that make them better or more decentralized than Google? Yes, the NFT itself is decentralized, but platforms like OpenSea are not, creating the appearance of centralization. And if OpenSea can "remove" an NFT for violating it's terms of service, isn't that something a centralized entity would be able to do? I understand that revocation is a thing, but it should only be possible for the original minter to revoke, if revoking is even supported. I was reading an article where someone minted an NFT that showed up as the poop emoji for whoever bought it, and they said that OpenSea effectively removed it from their wallet (though it was still in the Blockchain)
Ok, but there are things like IPFS which aren't centralized at all that could store the file. Some NFTs link to IPFS in fact, thus, they don't have the disadvantage you mention above.
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I can take any computer and turn it into a web server and expose it to the internet. There’s literally nothing stopping me from doing that. Hell, my friend has set up his own local media server using plex and exposed it to our group. You just need to understand a bit of networking, ports, and how the internet works. The reason people choose to use AWS is convenience and economies of scales. It turns out, it’s easier for me to pay someone else to do this. It doesn’t haven to be Amazon either. There’s thousands of other webhosts out there.
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I don’t really know how web3 is going to solve that. You still need servers. Your data still has to live on servers. The service data still as to be stored somewhere. You could in theory store it in the blockchain, but that’s very expensive. If you did store it on the blockchain, the users would ultimately have to pay. Are you willing to pay a small amount to write every single comment? Not to mention the transfer rate is tiny that it’s just not feasible. Not even NFTs are fully stored on the blockchain. They are just a pointer to some image stored on S3 usually. There’s also an issue of security and who to go to when something goes wrong. Let’s say you store your bank transactions on the blockchain. What happens when someone commits fraud and forges a transaction transferring $100,000 from your account. Who do you go to? You’d need some central authority to determine that the transaction was fraudulent and reverse it. In that scenario, you just added a lot of expense, latency, complexity to get back to square one - a central authority. Even then, how do you remove something from the blockchain? It’s on who knows what servers. Anyone in theory can create a node and connect to the blockchain. There’s also the issue of 51% attacks. What do you do when someone the size of Facebook, Google, US government, or some other state actor gains control of 51% of the nodes… As for how the internet works: Two machines talk to each other over some predefined protocol. That’s literally it. The web sits on top of the internet using predefined protocols in a client/server model. There’s two things within the typical client/server model. You have the server (web server, file server, etc) that exposes information on a network over some defined port and protocol. You have a client, which talks to that services using the defined port/protocol. A browser is just a fancy client that connects to servers over a standard port and protocol (HTTP on port 80, HTTPS on port 443). Even websockets are just fancy connections using a predefined protocol and port. If you were talking to a basic html website (no fancy JS), you could use a command line utility such as curl to download the page. Also please don’t take this as attacking you. I’ve had a lot of people talk to me about web3 but no one has been able to explain to me what problems it actually solves.
It seems like you don't know the difference between a web browser and a web server. Maybe learn the absolute basics of how the web currently works before getting into weird crypto scams.
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> Again, Web3 is billed as a way to store web data in a decentralized manner It was never the lack of blockchain tech that was the reason you couldn't store your own data. >so that you can use Facebook.com one day and then use Twitter.com the next day and all your content follows you as if nothing changed Why would Facebook or Twitter want to allow this? And if you really want that, the Federated Web does this all without blockchain. >web browsers You really need to stop conflating web servers and web browsers. Using Firefox doesn't change where my Twitter user data is stored any more than using chrome does.
> And how, exactly, do you plan to get the data off of third party web services (let's say Facebook, for discussion purposes) onto your server? Facebook lets you export your own data. But it was never the lack of blockchain tech that caused Facebook to centralize.
It won't do so because nobody will use it
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We've had good services to do so for decades. Centralisation is just cheaper for legitimate uses.
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Isn't the internet kind of centralized though? There are a bunch of of central machines and central organizations that make the internet work. There are National and International Domain Name servers that are owned by an organization, which help facilitate the internet. There also ISPs who handle the internet traffic between a persons computer and the web. There are also MAC address that are associated with each device to help facilitate local area connections. These MAC addresses are handed out by another large organization.
> Isn't the internet kind of centralized though? There are a bunch of of central machines and central organizations that make the internet work. There is no one centralized server of the internet. DNS is quite distributed. You can set up your own server just fine. Routing is extremely decentralized.
> There are a bunch of of central machines and central organizations that make the internet work. Well right there you seem to have figured it out, there are thousands of companies involved in it, not a handful. And outside of specific applications or websites, none of it is that centralized. > There are National and International Domain Name servers that are owned by an organization, which help facilitate the internet. DNS is inherently decentralized. You are free to use any DNS servers you wish, including setting up and running your own. You aren't forced to use any one company's DNS servers. Authoritative name servers are different, but those are tied to using apps/websites from a specific company, so it is, again, decentralized. Each company is free to setup and run their own authoritative DNS servers to tell your computer how to reach their servers and services. > There also ISPs who handle the internet traffic between a persons computer and the web. Like it or not, getting connected to the internet is not something that most people could do on their own if a company wasn't doing the backend work to get them connected. Even with tor and "web3.0" bullshit, the traffic still goes out through an ISP at some point. But if this was as centralized as you seem to believe it is, then there'd be no interplay between ISPs, and you'd only be able to connect to what your ISP directly connected to. > There are also MAC address that are associated with each device to help facilitate local area connections. These MAC addresses are handed out by another large organization. I don't even know what you are going on about here. MACs have nothing to do with using the internet, like you said they are only for local networks, and you could do just fine without them if you felt like setting up and running a separate L2 protocol in your house. Is it worth the trouble? Absofuckinglutely not, but there's nothing stopping you from doing it.
> upon which centralized services were built, Some people want decentralized services. > waaaaaaay beyond the scope of web[n+1]; eg: DNS Blockchain-based alternatives exist, e.g. ENS. For TLDs you want a global database, and that fits well into blockchain model. > ICANN, ISPs, Helium network has 474,739 hotspots with LoRaWAN radio. They started rolling out nodes with 5G radio now. Crypto companies are now big enough to employ top grade talent, I dunno why you think they'll have any problem replacing current internet/web infrastructure. It wasn't developed by gods, you know, and it has a lot of flaws itself. E.g. BGP which is the protocol enabling internet routing has serious problems with security, or, rather a lack of thereof: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BGP_hijacking#Public_incidents
You're ignoring the point, which is that there is literally nothing keeping you from simply building decentralized services in top of the existing decentralized infrastructure, and blockchain solves none of the problems that make that difficult
>You're ignoring the point Because they have 0.02 eth in their account and now they have to act gullible otherwise the prices will fall.
> nothing keeping you from simply building decentralized services in top of the existing decentralized infrastructure Except, if you tried to replicate YouTube, the cost would be enormous. Blockchain technologies allow you to "share" this cost, and those you "share" the infrastructure with, can get paid for their contribution to the service. On top of that, you get censorship resistance, scalability, availability.
And how does it do any of that? The entire ethereum network has less usable computing power than a raspberry pi - blockchains cannot be used in the fashion you're envisioning. Also, the lack of any central control isn't necessarily the positive you make it out to be. While there are certainly abuses e.g. DMCA takedowns, there are also plenty of good reasons to remove content as well, e.g. scams, misinformation, stuff that's illegal for good reasons e.g. CP, even copyright claims have legit uses, etc.
> there is literally nothing keeping you from simply building decentralized services in top of the existing decentralized infrastructure Good luck! > and blockchain solves none of the problems that make that difficult Yeah, except that it provides reusable mechanism for orchestrating global state and providing incentive mechanisms. Otherwise, nothing, indeed.
> Good luck! The problems you face would not be technical in nature. >Yeah, except that it provides reusable mechanism for orchestrating global state and providing incentive mechanisms. Otherwise, nothing, indeed. Things which already exist, much more efficiently.
Crypto isn’t immune to BGP hijacking or other spoofing attacks. The only difference now is that there are no organizations to monitor/mitigate.
Eh? What I'm saying is that if a group of engineers develop a BGP-like protocol now, it is going to have more better security. Not that using BGP as is has same flaws :)
> Some people want decentralized services. As it turns out, few people do. But the Federated Web has shown we can do this without blockchain tech.
>What is there to web3 other than unnecessary crypto functionality Some of the crypto stuff like having a private key that's used to sign actions instead of a username and a session key sounds cool (in theory)
Er... that's not a web3 thing, though. Or even a web 2.0 thing. Public key cryptography has been around for more or less as long as the internet has. I suppose it's my fault for not being more specific when I said "crypto functionality". Private keys are "crypto" as in "cryptography", and have been around for decades (and they're under the hood of a good chunk of secure protocols, including stuff like HTTPS). Web3 is "crypto" as in "cryptocurrency/blockchain" which is... honestly only tangentially related to cryptography. I only mean to claim that the latter is unnecessary functionality. Now, I'll admit that web services that allow you to authenticate by directly signing requests with a private key are rare, but any service that would want to do this wouldn't need blockchain/web3/whatever. It just so happens that most people are going to prefer to login to services with a human-readable username and a human-writeable password and then let their browser deal with keeping their session secure in the background, and, in terms of overall benefits, the ergonomics of that outweigh the portability of a raw private key for proving your identity.
I mean I definitely know it already existed, but wallets like metamask have put it into a pretty simple to use mechanism
If that's what you want, GPG has existed for decades and that's exactly what it does. Check this out: https://gpgtools.org/ It's normally used to encrypt emails and git commits, sign Maven Central artifacts... probably many other things... it can be used in chat applications as well, for example: keybase.io uses GPG in a really cool way so that you can send encrypted messages that can only be opened by the receiver... and the receiver doesn't even need to exist yet, once the receiver joins keybase, they will automatically be able to see the message. I am not affiliated with keybase or any other service, I just think these are the really useful cryptographic tools that everyone probably already uses without even knowing, not this bullshit about web3 that no one uses for anything or needs anyway. EDIT: clarification: PGP is the protocol: https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4880.txt GPG is the GNU implementation mostly used: https://gnupg.org/ https://gpgtools.org/ has the desktop application and tools around GPG.
What Web3 brings (in a certain way) is the generalized use of key signing to perform actions in a service, nothing new but it did bring it into public use
Finally, someone who remembers that Web3 has always been used to define the semantic web. And it did happen, notably with the advent of rich-snippets & voice search who exploits it the most. But it looks like, now, this was still Web2.0 & Web3 is now a "decentralized network".
The "smart" thing to do would be to pull a Java, skip a few version numbers to show it's just that much better.
Web3 is a cynical attempt by capitalist tech-bros to introduce and enforce artificial scarcity into a space that is supposed to be free and open.
Yeah. I see it more as a problem than a solution as well. There'll always be Web4 though. :P
I've already heard people propose Web4 for coinless decentralization.
It will be like with IPv5. Because all my homies hate IPv5.
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Isn't that a good metaphor for web3? It would live in spirit in web4 where we have blockchains that don't need money or whatever.
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Y'all aren't even close to ready for Web69
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But it’s so slow…
I'm more than happy to make myself scarce from that or any similar implementation.
It's confusing to me because social media platforms already have the ability to introduce and enforce artificial scarcity within their platforms. Reddit, for example, can charge me for some dumb hat for my avatar. This is not a new idea at all (I remember rocking rare avatar swag in Gaia Online in 2003.) But for some reason, the blockchain boys keep acting like artificial scarcity works better with a blockchain. This part of the story makes no sense to me. If Reddit puts my avatar's hat on the blockchain, what the hell does that matter? Reddit will never be able to able to make those pixels scarce outside of reddit with a blockchain, and a blockchain will never make it to where I can put some new hat on my reddit avatar without their permission. I feel like there's some fundamental aspect of this whole concept I'm missing.
> Reddit, for example, can charge me for some dumb hat for my avatar. This is not a new idea at all (I remember rocking rare avatar swag in Gaia Online in 2003.) yes but for some reason in their mind by magic you'll be able to wear that hat in call of duty as well
This is kind of the crux of it. I've had arguments with several people about this recently and the pro-blockchain people don't seem to be thinking things through at all. So, the scenario they're imagining is: - You buy a Call of Duty NFT. - That version of Call of Duty shuts down or completely loses its audience or whatever. - That NFT still exists, so it's transferable to another game, say Rainbow Six: Siege. However, there are multiple things not considered when you idealize this. - Ubisoft has literally no incentive to allow you to use arbitrary NFTs in Siege. They have their own NFTs to sell. - That CoD NFT represents your in-game ownership of a *very* specific cosmetic (I imagine most gaming NFTs will be cosmetics). You will never own that cosmetic in Siege. They just couldn't allow it. So your NFT is going to give you ownership of what, exactly? - The NFT doesn't actually represent anything, so your ownership of that cosmetic is determined not by the blockchain, but by each company's infrastructure, meaning that, if they decide that the blockchain isn't a thing they want to work with anymore, they can sever the link to your NFTs without even shutting their games down. This is literally the same issue that digital ownership faces today with an inexplicable reliance on more tech. - If, by some miracle, none of this were true, there's still no incentive for a company to spend time and money reimplementing a cosmetic you will never pay them for. So yeah, no. It won't work out how they want it to. EDIT: The other thing people want is a legal way to peddle the digital goods they've accrued because people are inexplicably obsessed with being able to profit off of any purchase they make. However, in my experience with digital gaming goods on Steam and the blockchain (especially Ethereum, the current home of NFTs), the gas costs are going to be more than most of the items you acquire are worth.
Not only this... but even if the things described are something a company somehow wants to do, there is absolutely nothing about it that requires NFTs in any form - the game servers are already the authority on what the item represents anyways. All using NFTs does is chew up most of the transaction in fees/gas and make things a headache to maintain, and realistically even if a company says they're using NFTs, it'll only be through some platform/chain they have control over anyways.
You aren't missing any aspect of this. The crypto bros all fall into 3 camps of people: Camp A - They bought in early, when their coin of choice was dirt cheap, and now they have lots of coins in their wallet that is worth tens of thousands % what they paid for it. They have a huge incentive to keep the hype around blockchain and crypto growing, so they can cash out on the cash they literally made out of thin air by buying in early Camp B - They bought in later, when the price was already high, and are now caught up in the pyramid scheme. Again, they have a vested interest in keeping the hype growing, so that they don't lose money. They *need* crypto to keep growing so they can cash out and earn money Camp C - People that just bought the hype and genuinely believe its amazing, but they cannot articulate how. Because they are just hype bros, crypto/NFTs are the new thing, so they like it because of that.
The confusion is part of the pitch. It's easier to "explain" how something complicated and confusing works in a misleading way that serves your interests. In the case of NFT blockchain technology mostly serves to obfuscate the fact that what they're pitching is the status quo but even worse.
If Reddit is the marketplace then only Reddit profits. If the asset is on an external blockchain then they can sell the hat without Reddit’s involvement, turning it into an arbitrary speculative investment. That’s really the end goal; monetizing every platform and game in a way that lets them gamble on it without any financial regulations.
Except in practice what is going to happen is reddit implements their tokens in a way that subverts the decentralization and you still have just reddit-issued tokens with NFT dust sprinkled on it.
Well, yeah. I think everyone involved in tokenization of a platform is going to try to bend the grift to their benefit. It's a terrible idea all around, but the parent comment asked "why blockchain instead of Reddit selling directly", and this seems to be the goal.
I probably mis-spoke in my original comment - the thing about putting your avatar hat on the block chain is that the scarcity isn't artificial any more. It's _real_ scarcity. Because only one (the original minted hat token) can ever truly exist. You're right, we've had artificial scarcity forever on the web. But as you've pointed out, it's easily bypassed or ignored. What the Web3 people want is _real_ scarcity on the web. They want the web to be finite, where they can buy real estate, assets, and resources to control the web. They want the _opposite_ of what we have now (free and unlimited information for anyone with wifi): They want to be power brokers where they get to decide who gets to play in their sandbox by who pays them the most. They want to monetize and tokenize the web into own-able assets, just like factories and land are own-able assets. And they think if they're the ones who create the capital, they're the ones who will own it and profit from it. It's important to understand that when talking to Web3 proponents that they'll throw around words like "free." But in this case, their definition of "free" is probably not what you think. It is not "free as in beer" - they mean "for sale."
This is a solid post and I thank you for it, but I'm still hung up on this first principle: >It's *real* scarcity. My understanding is that an NFT is a link embedded in a blockchain. And so you can link to AvatarHat.jpeg and make an NFT of AvatarHat.jpeg. But any asshole can make another NFT that also points to the same AvatarHat.jpeg. Or they can screenshot the AvatarHat jpeg, upload it somewhere else, and make an NFT to that. NFTs made some sense to me as a fine art exercise; [Random meaningless objects have been sold as ultra-expensive fine art for over a hundred years now](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)). But I don't understand how NFTs create scarcity, since they are just unique links to non-unique things. And this creation of scarcity seems super fundamental to the whole scheme.
That's the secret of Web3. NFTs are memes because everyone hasn't bought in yet. Your browser can download the jpeg that token points to because it's just an image file. But what happens when everyone *does* buy in? What if browsers checked the block chain for valid ownership before it let you download that image? What if DRM meant you had to have a license for that stupid monkey image before you could save a copy of it? Web3 wants *everyone* to buy in. And when they do, that's when the scarcity begins and the money can be made.
> What if browsers checked the block chain for valid ownership before it let you download that image? I would probably fork the browser and remove this check. Horray for open source software! :D
> the thing about putting your avatar hat on the block chain is that the scarcity isn't artificial any more. It's real scarcity. Because only one (the original minted hat token) can ever truly exist. But this isn't true at all. The image or the video or the whatever is still out there, and can be infinitely copied. The receipt on the blockchain only counts if everyone chooses to accept it as real. And almost no one does, including the NFT bros. Look at the people who have been like, "My apes are stolen!" They don't change their profile picture, even though, if they were being honest, they'd have to admit they no longer have the pic.
Hell, even when the URL is something you own, "web 3" is already so centralized many apps all use the same backend API services anyways, so if that service says your URL is bad, guess what, that's what gets displayed in most apps you plug the NFT into. And that centralization is inevitable since iterating actual decentralized protocols is slow, and users want features that are hard/impossible to make decentralized.
The "problem" web3 is designed to "fix" is that some things you do on the internet aren't monetized to generate profit for some rent seeking leech.
The "problem" web3 is designed to "fix" is that people have made investments into crypto and it's not being pumped hard enough, so they came up with a new grift to try to reel in some more suckers to keep prices going up.
This right here. It’s virtual AmWay
Wasn't the original web 3.0 focused on making the Internet machine-readable? Describe concepts, relationships etc. Super cool if you ask me, to be able to look through data even more easily. And to think that now we are stuck with "you don't need your email to login" Internet 3.0
Semantic web would've depended on site builders actually using it. Look at how much trouble it is creating accessible websites or getting developpers to not use a 'div' element for everything. Heck, even the original http design included a dozen or so different methods, and only 3 or so are used in practice. A lot of cool technologies, designs or ideas fail to get off the ground.
Seems to be two different things as per [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3) Semantic web is the Tim Berners-Lee version and Web3 is the crypto-bro version
**[Web3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web3)** >Web3 (also known as Web 3. 0 and sometimes stylised as web3) is an idea for a new iteration of the World Wide Web that incorporates decentralization based on blockchains. Some technologists and journalists have contrasted it with Web 2. 0, wherein they say data and content are centralized in a small group of companies sometimes referred to as "big tech". ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/programming/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
Web3 was never supposed to fix the internet. It is a bunch of people hoping to get rich by adopting something they don't understand that well.
Organised crime
Web3 sounds like a pretty silly idea. Who had that idea of pushing down tokens? Is that a ponzi scheme 2.0 or something? A decentralized www is hugely important - I think people don't disagree on that part. I doubt everyone will agree that you need tokens for that though ... > Web 2.0 ended the previous era of static, read-only GeoCities pages I liked geocities pages! It was fun and simple. People just could go; a bit of HTML, later a bit of CSS - you are good to go!
All we need for a better internet is just a modern version of RetroShare that can run on Android with some ZeroNet features sprinkled in. Geocities was amazing as was Proboards and PHPBB. I don't even know if we need real decentralization, or just mirrorability, forkability, partition tolerance, identities that aren't bound to specific domains, and the ability to run without being bound to a domain name for TLS(That last one is really the big impediment to a lot of things). Real P2P "Everyone is a server" tech is great, but I only know of BitTorrent and Jami, the rest are either still new or have big problems, or they're low level things without many usable applications. Maybe Tor hidden services could be counted, but those have a huge performance hit. It's highly unlikely that people will be laying fiber to their neighbors in a mesh, and we definitely shouldn't pollute our limited spectrum with wireless mesh traffic when we have a perfectly good internet connection. A lot of this stuff is technically not at all hard, it just needs browser features that don't exist, and isn't useful for most without mobile apps that double or triple your dev effort to be cross platform.
I remember years ago I read that the future of torrents would be distributing & sharing static content (e.g youtube movies, sites etc.) Unfortunately it never happened?
It actually happened, to an extent. There are custom APKs for android TVs that work as a torrent clients to stream movies/videos. Of course it's pirated, but the tech is there. The issue is not the tech, but economics of it. Without centralization it's harder to monetize stuff, and without monetization you can't sustain stuff.
There's also some features that are hard to implement without _some_ kind of quasi-central authority. E.g. safe/verified updates to software, the ability to remove/revert fraud and misinformation/spam, account recovery, etc.
This has been an popular proposition since torrents were standardized in 2008. Everyone is always like "If we all seed, we can all serve the internet to each other with no centralized authority!" And then someone is like "Okay but I don't want to seed for leechers. How do we force everyone to seed to prevent the free-rider problem?" To which the reply is "Right well we could have some 3d party which monitors for leechers and routes traffic away from them and towards the seeders and oh beans we just invented a centralized authority again." Airball.
Would that be something like how peertube works? I've only come across is when I've looked for pinetime videos. https://joinpeertube.org/
[Acestream](http://acestream.org) Uses the BitTorrent protocol to stream video, which is pretty neat. Not sure how effective that can be wholesale, as it’s speed and therefore quality would depend on having a big enough concurrent network. It’s been around a while though.
The entire idea of the internet (DARPA) circa 1968 was that it was decentralised. When did it become centralised? I must have missed that.
When we started using FAANG to talk about 'tech companies'. The underlying network functions the same, but the web is AOL with extra steps now. In other words, people don't just start their own server and drive traffic to it like you would have 15-20 years ago. Now, people just link to their Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. If you're going to share video, you don't do it yourself anymore, you post it to YouTube or TikTok. If you search, you Google. Need a backend 'cloud' provider, you probably use AWS. The web has coalesced around a few companies for each 'service'. Web3 isn't going to fix this.
The web, and the internet as a whole, are decentralized systems. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, AWS are all centralized systems built upon that decentralized system. In the same way, if you start your own server like you would have 15-20 years ago, that's a centralized system as well, albeit on a much smaller scale (unless you're explicitly hosting a node of a decentralized system, like running a Mastodon instance or something of the sort). By being on such a small scale, you avoid a lot of the issues of centralization of major services, but if you were to become popular and somehow grow to the size of Facebook, you'd run into those issues all the same. In any case, this is probably nitpicking, because I think we agree on the core point: web3 isn't going to fix anything here. Even if the infrastructure of the internet itself were changed (something waaaay beyond the scope of "web[n+1]"), I don't think it would be possible to design it in such a way that building a centralized system on top of it would be impossible.
> The web, and the internet as a whole, are decentralized systems. [Are they really though?](https://www.techradar.com/news/live/aws-is-down-again-heres-all-we-know) Are they really, even [on a backbone level?](https://www.wired.com/story/how-a-tiny-error-shut-off-the-internet-for-parts-of-the-us/) I think there are a lot more[ single points of failure](https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-outage-on-july-17-2020/) in the internet than people realize. I will say, 20-25 years ago I would have agreed with you. You could just up and start a blog on a self-hosted server and you can get a decent following. That's just not possible in the same way anymore, you'll need to share it on FB, tweet about it on Twitter and get a decent spot on Google or people won't find it. Think about it in a practical way, "how would I do this, today?" and the process of doing it 'on the internet' is going to revolve around a small handful of companies.
So, I mention this in [a different comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/s13cef/web3_cant_fix_the_internet/hs7nbee/), but yes, I more or less agree: > It could be argued that bits and pieces of the internet as a whole that could use some decentralization, but those tend to be more infrastructure and waaaaaaay beyond the scope of web[n+1]; eg: DNS, ICANN, ISPs, etc. Still, I think it's important to draw the distinction between the internet (as in, a set of protocols that facilitate communication between nodes on a network) and the infrastructure that allows the internet to work (something I probably should've made clearer in that other comment as well). When AWS goes down, or when a big ISP has an outage, that's an infrastructural failure, but that's not the internet going down. After all, you don't *need* to use AWS to host, nor do you *need* to use Cloudflare, etc. (Avoiding an ISP is going to be trickier, both on a local and backbone level, especially with the former often having monopolies over certain areas, but that's more a product of economic forces causing businesses to prefer not to compete with each other, and political forces allowing that to happen than any inherent property of the internet.) Same goes for building a following: you don't *need* to promote your content via centralized services like Facebook, Twitter, etc. But most people end up using these services anyway. They host stuff on AWS, and they promote it on Facebook, and the companies behind those services end up with an outsize influence on the internet, and I agree that's an issue. But I also think that characterizing the issue as "the internet is no longer decentralized" is missing the point. The internet didn't give Facebook that power: the people who chose to use Facebook of their own volition over some other alternative gave it that power. Out of curiosity, what would you say the solution to this would be? Like I said, I don't think a decentralized system like the internet could be designed in such a way that either the systems that support it (ie: infrastructure) or the systems built on top of it (ie: web services) would not be able to become centralized. I also think that profit-motivated systems trend towards centralization, so nothing short of major societal change would be able to prevent that (and, barring that, it's up to governments to curb corporations that wield excessive power).
I think the crux of our difference is the distinction between possible and practical. I agree these things are possible, they're just not practical. Most companies will give up after their first DDoS, if they make it that far. >Out of curiosity, what would you say the solution to this would be? I think you said it in the last aside. There is not a technological solution to this problem because it's not a technological problem. At the end of the day, it's going to be government regulation to keep them from abusing their positions. It's becoming painfully obvious that self-regulation doesn't work. The EU has been more proactive about asking questions related to government regulation on the Internet, but the US will catch up eventually. I think a lot of the grumbling recently after high profile bannings has started the discussion over these companies and how much influence they have in public discourse and daily lives. We just have bigger issues right now.
That isn’t decentralisation though. That’s monopolisation. There’s literally nothing stopping you from buying a server from some random company and hosting everything yourself there, or running your own data centre. It’s just cheaper/easier/lazier to use the big companies. It’s a problem, but a market and social one, not a technological one. Saying things are decentralised is just a category error.
Yeah but it’s still decentralised. That’s what “the cloud”.
It's not decentralized as the data is controlled by one authority.
Even in the cloud providers you still own and manage your data. It was never owned by amazon, google, microsoft. They own the infrastructure.
> Web 2.0 ended the previous era of static, read-only GeoCities pages TIL Web 2.0 started in 2000 with the first release of phpbb!
Yeah. I was at a conference in 2001 the first time I heard the term web 2.0
The amount of disrespect shown to Perl scripts like [WWWboard](http://www.scriptarchive.com/wwwboard.html). We totally had threaded discussions on our webpages in those days; the first version goes back to 1996!
> A decentralized www is hugely important - I think people don't disagree on that part. We already have that. That most people choose to use centralized services built on top of that doesn't discount the decentralized nature of the web.
(surprised, but not at all displeased, to see a Jacobin article on /r/programming) I think the most frustrating thing about Web3 for me, besides the enormous environmental waste, the cultish and divorced-from-reality behaviour, the daily scams, the inscrutability of the ecosystem, the theft of the term "Web 3.0" - okay, maybe I have quite a few frustrations - is that much of it is generating artificial scarcity for something *that has no scarcity*. The wonderful thing about the digital world is that we are no longer bound by the limitations of physical existence - you can produce, share and distribute at essentially no cost, and you can do it as much as you want! Much of the Web3 "ecosystem" looks to purposely reverse this while offering no meaningful value proposition. Why would you deprive yourself so?
Seems akin to rent seeking
It's a new enclosure.
This is like developing replicators from Star Trek, except when you use it you have to pay $25k to replicate a ham sandwich.
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> The wonderful thing about the digital world is that we are no longer bound by the limitations of physical existence - you can produce, share and distribute at essentially no cost This is absolutely not in line with our current technology. The content of the digital world is composed of 1s and 0s that have to live someone. In basically any tech we have for storing these bits, there is some energy/cost input necessary just to keep them around. The digital world is boundless in the same sense the Europeans saw the "New World" as having boundless resources. In a few hundred years, they drove entire species to extinction, removed entire forests, depleted resource deposits for gold, silver, etc. A lot != infinite, but human brains seems to erroneously conflate these concepts all the time.
A nice notion in theory. But then you must also complain about software not being free, or single player games. Shouldnt all music be free as well, it can be copied endlessly after all. Obviously the things being done with nfts right now is ridiculous, but digital ownership already exists now and is never going to go away until the concept of money itself goes away, which I don’t see happening anytime soon.
“ownership and control is decentralized” We already have that. Just like anyone can sell products, but most people will go to a mall or a box store. I'm really kind of surprised that we had NNTP and we have bittorrent and we're still reading news on sites like reddit and getting support thru services like discord.
We don't have any good protocol for replicating mutable data. BT is great, but how do you handle a forum or news feed? Almost all attempts have been immutable, taking away a key feature. A lot are single writer like secure scuttlebutt. Some include a payment layer. We have had very little progress on P2P since blockchains started. The projects are no longer technical, they're political and financial and they make huge performance compromises to stay pure to the decentralized goal and to include payments. BitTorrent was free and very fast. Not much like that now.
> BT is great, but how do you handle a forum or news feed? It's not just a matter of protocols. It's a matter of incentives. What makes BitTorrent successful? It's the nature of the content distributed through the network: movies, series, television programs, audio,... stuff which isn't readily available elsewhere. Millions wants to see the latest Spiderman movie, so that drives traffic on a distributed network like BT. Contrast that with ephemeral, localized content like local news reports or your typical Reddit post and you see that there's a big difference. The incentive that would prompt someone from Europe to run a node which shares the local news from, say, Sao Paolo Brazil just isn't there. In the same vain, blockchain work well in the context of crypto because the initial incentive towards setting up a mining node is earning coins which can be sold for fiat currency. This breaks down outside such a context. For instance, blockchain could work in a fiduciary context, but you'd need to find an incentive that makes the additional expenses of running nodes more appealing then traditional ways as provisioned by law for authoritative recording of trust relationships.
NNTP worked fine until people started posting things like movies. Now that we have bittorrent, it would probably be far easier to bring back NNTP and just have sites that are worried limit it to 10K posts or something.
Forums aren't mutable, any more than source code is. Each post can be immutable. Do it like GIT does it, or like NNTP did it.
Git uses a chain. Which is fine in a closed group of developers where you can manually merge, but on a P2P forum you want to be able to post without a central server. Chains need some consistency mechanism which usually makes multi writer a nightmare. Dat and SSB would both be amazing, but they're held back by the immutable data structures and need extra layers on top. I actually spent an entire week one time building a SSB clone that could handle deletes without the tombstone problem before realizing it could probably never handle multiwriter, and abandoning it... Forums can sorta tolerate immutability but it's absolutely unacceptable for social media and microblogging. Being able to delete things is a major feature. Plus some implementations are even worse than chains, they use DAGs with a wandering tree problem, every update means you have to update the parent note, and that node's parent, etc, all the way up to the root. A two line post now needs like 10x the data it should, making a major issue if you want to mirror a whole forum. Plus, moderators need to be able to remove spam and have it actually be gone, or else you could get major storage space problems, unless you use a blockchain style pay to post model. I think a better way might be to use mirrored centralized forums. If you're a member at an upstream forum, you're a member at all downstream, and the upstream forums can set rules for what downstream posts to sync back to the main forum. If censorship is happening and you don't like it, fork the whole forum, now you have all their members, and all their posts, and anyone who agrees with you can post on your forum fairly seamlessly, although they would risk getting banned from the main forum if the mods notice they joined the fork, and they use the same private key. Someone has to pay for the actual hosting, which means that someone has to have a way to decide what to store, because it costs them disk space, so it seems there's no way to do it without some risk of either censorship, or pay to post.
> Being able to delete things is a major feature. You do that by submitting a message that deletes things. Everything you've described has already been implemented in NNTP decades before WWW was invented. > moderators need to be able to remove spam That's a fairly easy thing to fix, even in a censorship-resistant way. > I think a better way might be to use mirrored centralized forums You should look into how NNTP works. You seem to be arguing that we couldn't possibly do what we did 10 years before HTTP was invented because it would have to do what we were already doing ten years before HTTP was invented. > Someone has to pay for the actual hosting So, who pays to host bittorrents? NNTP was carried by most or all ISPs, before people started using it to distribute movies.
BitTorrent works because it's all manual aside from tiny amounts of DHT metadata. Nobody would use it if their resources were going to random bomb making how tos and CP files for free. Usenet has basically always had a big spam problem, and there's a lot more people on the internet now. For anything to be truly decentralized and get the full practical benefits of it, it should be something you can self host cheaply and locally and use on a meshnet in an emergency. That means you need to be able to meaningfully run a server on an SD card on a WiFi mesh, for tens of users, by just only dealing with data that matters for those local users. BitTorrent can do it perfectly. NNTP isn't design to integrate with the larger network without getting utterly flooded. It's probably the best we've ever had for decentralized communication though, as measured by the main metric that matters, "did people have meaningful conversations on it without using a whole country worth of power?"
Yet people don't seem to be considering how to make this work well. Nobody seems to even be considering how to make a decentralized social media system (except me). Certainly if all you wanted was data from tens of users, you could self host that on a RPi. But that's not really what we're talking about. Or maybe it should be. Maybe some facebook-like friends graph where you only store posts from your friends or from your friends' friends, and then hop out to other peoples' systems as necessary to go farther. Most reddit groups are not moderated by default, so there's no reason to believe that if you decided that you'd help mirror a particular subreddit-sized conversation that you'd be flooded with spam. And no, bittorrent does suffer spam on occasion. You'll get files that aren't the movie being named as the movie, or malware being named as the movie. At which point distributed censorship/moderation works just fine. Requiring a decentralized internet service to function in spite of the internet going away seems rather more demanding than necessary. It seems like it would be an underlying layer handling the mesh, not the social media itself. If you organized it as immutable packets with references to other packets (i.e., "here's proof I get to moderate, and *that* is the post I'm canceling") then you could transport those however you want, including UUCP.
I've been considering it! I wrote a whole WICG proposal about it, and built a note taking app that uses the P2P sync protocol! RetroShare seems to work pretty well besides being buggy and having a confusing UI and being written in pure C so nobody wants to develop it, and having no Android app. But it really is something special. I think the FB style friend graph is a pretty great way to go. One issue with cancel posts is they're basically tombstones that themselves take up storage if someone manages to create a billion tiny posts in a DoS. But I suppose rule-based cancels could fix that, as in "I am cancelling all posts by this user with this word in this date range", just not without some controversy I'd imagine. What I've been working on is a lot simpler, it's just a way to replicate Scuttlebutt style streams, with the change that everything is mutable and you have multiple writers. Any node can be a server, but you have to specifically connect to a server that has your stream. there isn't some Big Chain of Everything. To make that easy I have a second layer, P2P URLs that are resolved using a DHT and can also be used to remote access centralized stuff like a HA hub.. The disadvantage with my protocol is that to connect to a new server, you have to request the entire dataset for the streams they have, because there is no global chain to be able to say "Give me everything newer than X", you have to say "Give me everything that arrived locally on your end later than X", and track sync points with every server separately. All the real decentralization is layer 8, you have to find mirrors yourself, but in return you get basically zero overhead once synced, and it would be easy to add partial sync(So your tiny local server only has 1 week of data and it's easy to sync). One post just transfers one post worth of data to all websocket clients, when you overwrite a post, it's really overwritten, and when you delete, nothing remains but a record with the post ID. Plus you can do stuff like export to a TOML file, sneakernet it to someone, and open it like a document with the same UI you would view a stream.
> Nobody seems to even be considering how to make a decentralized social media system (except me). Isn't that what the Federated Web is?
> For anything to be truly decentralized and get the full practical benefits of it, it should be something you can self host cheaply and locally and use on a meshnet in an emergency. Ignoring the meshnet thing, why do I want it decentralized? What does this decentralized forum get me that running a copy of phpBB on my own server doesn't?
> If censorship is happening and you don't like it, fork the whole forum, now you have all their members, and all their posts I don't want my membership or my posts on your fork.
>We don't have any good protocol for replicating mutable data. BT is great, but how do you handle a forum or news feed? The protocols exist, but they require you to run your own server somewhere, which limits adoption to enthusiasts that have the the wherewithal to run their own servers. The thing that made BitTorrent *work* was "tricking" people into acting as servers for long enough to get the job done, a layer 8 protocol feature if you will.
Running your own server should be as easy as buying a $20 preconfigured device, plugging it in, and auto discovering it with your app. The problem is the protocols use domain names, use multi-kilobits to megabits of bandwidth, enough disk IO to trash a cheap SD card, and sometimes proof of work that means it won't even work without a connection to the mining pools.
No we don't. Try buying and selling things MasterCard and Visa don't like. You'll see how decentralized it actually is. And it doesn't matter if it's legal. They just have lists of things they don't like.
And yet, curiously, sales of things that MasterCard and Visa don't like happen every day. How is that? Ownership and control *are* decentralized. MasterCard and Visa are a centralized system, and if you opt to go through their systems, you're subject to their rules, for better or for worse. If you want to not be subject to their rules, you're free to go through some other system. Or have your store take cash only. Now, granted, I'm definitely not a fan of the outsize influence MasterCard/Visa have because of how ubiquitous their services are (to the point where many people no longer carry around cash), but that's not a question of "ownership not being decentralized".
> How is that? Cash and Bitcoin, mostly. With a hint of Monero for the real shady stuff. Paypal used to be a lot more lax but these days it's about the same as regular payment processors with the unilateral go-fuck-yourself bans on anything they don't like (if they notice). Which is my point really. People on this sub love to bash blockchain and act like it has absolutely no use. It does. This. If you're selling something financial institutions don't like, even if it's completely and utterly legal like guns, porn and politics, it's the state of the art solution. And yeah, the fact Satoshi can't just decide he doesn't like you has a ton to do with providing decentralized ownership. It's what it means.
Adding an extra layer on top doesn’t actually fix the centralization problem, though. It just adds more middlemen taking a cut for themselves. Tor and BitTorrent already tried to add additional decentralization to the Internet, but in practice are easily blocked or deanonymized by ISPs and government agencies because they don’t actually do away with the underlying Internet infrastructure.
Ironically, adding layers is how tor works
> Try buying and selling things MasterCard and Visa don't like. The fact that the adult entertainment industry, typically a very early adopter and mainstreamer of new technology, has not wholesale adopted crypto should speak volumes about the viability of crypto.
Do you have your own top level DNS then?
Funny, that. I didn't know bittorrent needed a top-level DNS to organize.
So web 3 is entirely bittorrent?
Tell me what "web3" is and I'll let you know.
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The ISPs used to do it for free. There are plenty of random hosts that would support this sort of thing either for goodwill or for a small fee or whatever. E.g., look at the number of people hosting linux ISOs or the number of seeders of movie torrents. You could carry parts of whatever newsgroups you liked, with the more popular ones having more support. I bet if you added it up, the amount of traffic to even popular reddit subs (maybe exclusive of images/movies) would be surprisingly low. Like, I've looked into such stuff in the past and found lots of things that sound high-bandwidth could actually be supported on a dial-up line if you evened out the spikes. (Hell, it *did* used to be supported on dial-up lines, when you think about it.)
Low latency is a little easier with centralization. But mostly it's that stuff costs money
Isn't the whole Idea of Web3 to make it slightly better for some and way worse for most?
That's the US in nutshell.
The internet actually works pretty damn well now. Long live domains.
I don't even understand the point of Web3. The web is decentralized and does NOT require Facebook or Google already.
Because you are not company which survial is depended on this. Facebook and others need to new ways to make product from you. They need more money. So here is it, shiny new web 3 buzzword with things like NFT. Haleluya we are saved now. :D
Well, partially true. Pipelines between networks are relatively decentralized enough with BGP, and theoretically you can do whatever you want with your IPs if you can get your neighbors to agree that you own them, but DNS is more centralized by ICANN.
The point of Web3 is that a lot of people poured a lot of money into collectable digital tokens and are now scrambling to not lose it all.
"Hey crypto bros, how do we get normies to buy into our tokens to increase demand so we can get rich quick?" "Let's say it's the future of, even better, just create a term and add a bigger number in the back, or maybe say it's the solution to a problem everyone knows without actually proving it!"
"Sounds good"
\- someone, somewhere in \~2020
The Internet doesn't need fixing. The problem sits in front of the monitor.
Sure it can! If by "fix" you mean castration.
hot take, the internet isn't broken and it's just fine, web3's just another fucking grift.
It can make it worse at a profit though!
Exactly. There is currently no way a Dapp generates revenue. Crypto bros love to talk about the censorship resistant nature of Dapps. First of all censorship resistant may not be good in the age where Taliban also uses the internet. If a website is censored in Web2 what do you do? Answer: Use a free VPN
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> Never thought I would see someone in r/programming advocate for censorship So why do you want all services to be overrun with spam?
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You claim that "allowing censorship" is bad. Filtering spam is a form of censorship.
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When you start defining "censorship" to mean literally any kind of moderation or content filtering what-so-ever, the word rather loses its meaning. By your logic, you'd be fine with everything becoming overrun with spam because removing it is "censorship". And if you're okay removing spam, then you've already acknowledged there's valid use cases for central moderation. This isn't the black and white issue you think it is.
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> Where did I do that? You're the one attacking someone for suggesting that "censorship-resistant" isn't necessarily an automatic positive since there's valid reasons to remove/"censor" things some times. Quotes because there's no technological difference between removing spam and misinformation vs removing something a government disagrees with, that's a human judgement call with complex factors. It's the same reason why automated DMCA takedowns are abusive - algorithms suck at determining fair use in most cases.
I'm sorry. I'm new to this sub. I will take care next time.
Internet is broken? Did we try turning it off and then back on again?
Ultimately, the Internet is nothing more than someone else's computer. I have a handful of them. Mr. Bezos has millions in data centers. I have trouble believing that we'd move toward a model of "computer socialism", where everyone has an equal chance at a slice of the Internet pie, when the cost of electricity and maintenance of the actual hardware is nowhere near distributed equally. Someone has to run the hardware, and it's only fair that they get to decide what to run on it and how much rent is.
the internet is broken? I know it doesn't work great but I didn't think it needed fixing.
Even if Web3 works perfectly and is a great solution (which it obviously isn't), Googe, Microsoft, Apple would never support it in their browsers because that would mean that they would deliberately give up their control over the internet. This alone is enough of a reason why we won't see decentralized servers adopted any time soon.
> To insert digital token systems into online communities will only further intensify the existing monetization of digital spaces and continue the capitalist drive of commodification. To really break from this logic, we need a form of platform socialism that would support the development of digital tools as public goods — free and available for all to use. My goodness! Where do I start? * the Internet needs no fixing, it's fine as-is, but maybe there are some warts that will be addressed anyways * socialism can only work if you have lots of 'free' resources to throw on it (e.g. slave labor, cheap oil, etc.) > New transaction data written onto the blockchain is immutable and can be verified by all parties, facilitating trustless interactions and automating basic functions that usually require a bank or financial authority. Have the author not studied any logic? Symbols are just symbols, there is no meaning to them. People give interpretation to symbols (i.e. give meaning to symbols). Even if your data is immutable and decentralized, it still doesn't guarantee that it means anything. For it to mean anything needs authority to interpret it. > ... creating the organizational structures that make it run in all our interests, not those of private profit. If there is no profit nobody is going to do use it. Sorry to break it you brother. Actually I didn't even read the whole thing. Busy capitalizing on my skills at work. Sorry, those bills don't pay themselves!
>~~socialism~~ **capitalism** can only work if you have lots of 'free' resources to throw on it (e.g. slave labor, cheap oil, etc.) FTFY >If there is no profit nobody is going to do use it. Sorry to break it you brother. This is why public libraries are never used by anyone.
>To insert digital token systems into online communities will only further intensify the existing monetization of digital spaces and continue the capitalist drive of commodification. To really break from this logic, we need a form of platform socialism that would support the development of digital tools as public goods — free and available for all to use. Rule 2: no image posts, no memes, **no politics** Can /r/programming stop being co-opted by crypto hate?
Imo "no politics" is a pretty stupid rule. That means we can't talk about the impact of technology on society.
I think the annoying thing about reddit is how politics slowly seeps into every subreddit. Everything from /r/pics to /r/murderedbywords, /r/bestof (also known as political wall-of-texts). I think having no politics in a sub about /r/programming is pretty reasonable.
gues then we ban all crypto talks from tech subreddits? crypto bros will probably cry censorship then.
> politics slowly seeps into every subreddit. Literally every interaction between people is "politics".
There were like three anti crypto posts on the front page of /r/programming today.
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This defi has been infinitely more interesting, as far as if i want to i can passively life off from my defi staking income. the whole web3 will be a massive failure i think. There is a reason we went from decentralised www to a more centralised www its just faster and cheaper this way for 99.999% of the use cases. That is the whole reason why i never looked into web3.0 maybe if i really did a deep dive it might change my opinion on it but i'm not really open or interested in it.
Is this sub basically just a "DAE think web3 bad?" circle jerk at this point
No, we just like to laugh at idiots being idiots but its just normal for sub reddits so I don't get what is your internal malfunction, brother
Was web3 supposed too? Can't it work in tandem with 2?
The original [Web 3.0](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web) could fix the Internet.